Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom Bianchi 's photos - intimacy between men 30 years ago

Intimacy Between Men
By Jonathan Curiel
Wednesday, Jun 3 2015
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COURTESY OF TOM BIANCHI. - Untitled Polaroid from "Fire Island Pines, 1975-1983"

Courtesy of Tom Bianchi.
Untitled Polaroid from "Fire Island Pines, 1975-1983"

Tom Bianchi: Fire Island PinesThrough July 15 at Scott Nichols Gallery, 49 Geary, S.F. 415-788-4641 or scottnicholsgallery.com. Free. Bianchi is speaking at the gallery during an artist's reception Thursday, June 25, 5-8 p.m. Based on the Hexagon: The Recent Drawings of Monir FarmanfarmaianThrough June 27 at Haines Gallery, 49 Geary, S.F. Free. 415-397-8114 or hainesgallery.com.

In the late 1970s, as Robert Mapplethorpe exhibited photos that revealed the sexual intimacies of New York City's gay BDSM community, Tom Bianchi was also photographing New York's gay sex scene. Like Mapplethorpe, Bianchi was an active participant in and documentarian of the swaddling of muscular flesh. But Bianchi focused his lens on those who traipsed around Fire Island Pines, an enclave just 60 miles from Manhattan where men could cavort openly amid sands and water without fear of judgment or arrest. The "magical," "wholesome" atmosphere complemented the stark, enclosed environments that Mapplethorpe spotlighted — a yin to Manhattan's yang. But Bianchi never reached a wide audience with his Polaroid shots of buff men kissing and lying on towels. His photos "weren't marketable," publishers told him. So Bianchi, who once exhibited his work in a New York gallery alongside Mapplethorpe's, waited for the right time to publish his Fire Island Pines photos. The wait lasted 30 years.

"The world," Bianchi says, "just wasn't ready for them."

A prestigious art-house publisher finally printed Bianchi's Fire Island photos in 2013. And a new exhibit at Scott Nichols Gallery in downtown San Francisco, "Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines," continues the public emergence of images that capture a unique time in New York City's gay history: the years between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. In Bianchi's portfolio, which spans 1975-1983, gays at Fire Island were newly liberated even if they were still closeted in their "regular" lives. During those years, Bianchi was a top corporate lawyer with Columbia Pictures who told his closest straight friends about his sexual nature and eventually came out completely. Given the tightly knit nature of New York's arts community, it was inevitable that Bianchi would meet Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol, both of whom used Polaroid cameras in their work. Around 1982, after inviting the photographer to The Factory, his famous New York studio, Warhol even expressed interest in publishing Bianchi's Fire Island Pines photos.

"It was the blandest meeting I've ever taken in my life," Bianchi says by phone from his home in Palm Springs. "Bob Colacello [a writer and friend of Warhol's] knew about the project and said, 'Andy's got a three-book deal. His first one is out but he doesn't even have ideas for No. 2 and 3. Maybe he can do this under that contract.' I went to The Factory, and Andy, Bob, and I stood at a counter table, and Andy flipped through the pages saying things like, 'Oh, that's nice.' And, 'Oh, that's nice.' And at the end, he said, 'I think we should do your book. Bob will call you.' And when I got back on the street, I saw a telephone booth. And a voice came inside my head clanging, 'Do not call any of your friends and tell them that Andy Warhol is doing your book.' As it turned out, his first book was his Polaroids at Studio 54. And the book hadn't done well enough to convince his publisher that they needed to talk to him about any more ideas."

Bianchi published more than a dozen other books before Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines. Most of the men within the Fire Island pages, and at Scott Nichols Gallery, are chiseled specimens with skimpy briefs or tight jeans. Bianchi shows men completely nude, or with penises bulging from their swimwear, though these men's faces are out of frame — a recognition that these beachgoers may not have wanted their identities completely revealed.

We don't see fornication, but we do see scenes of postcoital bliss or the prelude to sex: laughter among couples, group hugs in the waves, the stroking of chests and legs. Whether it's diving in the pool, doing head-stands on the beach, or lying on a towel with roving eyes, there's lots of showing off. One image centers on a can of Crisco, widely used as a sexual lubricant. While Mapplethorpe showed penetration, including his own, and Warhol captured the art of fellatio, Bianchi honed in on courtship. As a straight editor told Bianchi decades ago, when he was shopping his Fire Island images around, "I never imagined this kind of intimacy between men."

That was then, and this is now: Same-sex marriage is legal in states across America, and in popular culture same-sex kissing between men is commonplace. Witness the new Grace and Frankie Netflix series, where newly out characters portrayed by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston — in the pilot episode —smooch affectionately on the lips. In 2014, Michael Sam, the first openly gay NFL prospect, kissed his boyfriend Vito Cammisano on national TV. Bianchi's photos are a time capsule of once-unmarketable images that exalt the gay community, though some of the men depicted ultimately remained semi-closeted.

The transition wasn't a smooth gradient. Bianchi's lover from this period, David Patterson, once admonished Bianchi for bringing a "fag" pink towel to their gym in Los Angeles, claiming it announced their sexuality in a way that he wasn't comfortable with. As a teenager, Bianchi was intimate with another teen boy, who later denied he was interested in same-sex relationships. Self-hatred, Bianchi says, was then rife in the gay community. The photos at Scott Nichols Gallery depict an outwardly festive time for men who were finally comfortable among themselves. Integrating with the wider world would come much, much later.

"We have moved stunningly to a new era, and I find myself feeling proud to be Irish again," Bianchi, who's now 69, says, alluding to Ireland's vote to legalize same-sex marriage.

"Back when I was high-school age, it was a terrifying world to imagine you'd come into it unable to relate, and in danger of humiliation," Bianchi says. "I was completely in love with a best friend, Bob, a very alpha male who was co-captain of the football team and class president. We were messing around since adolescence. And we had a full-tilt experience just before leaving for college in different towns. And that night was the first night we were completely naked in each other's arms all night long. The next holiday, I wanted to not go back to my family's house and spend it with Bob. And he wrote back saying, 'Since you are a homosexual, and I am not, I can never see you again.' The trauma of that experience was profound. Bob's life ended tragically — two failed marriages, alcoholism, and he was dead in his 30s. And when I found Fire Island, which was my gateway into the gay community, one of my first thoughts was, 'Oh, my God; if Bob had only been able to find this.'"

Adds Bianchi: "It was important to me, when I found this sunny beach, with beautiful guys laughing and playing, that I didn't want anybody like me or Bob to not know that this existed for us. And this was a world that we could live in. The idea of documenting Fire Island Pines was a political act. I wanted it to be something that our families would come to understand."

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who passed away on May 25 was revered for a lifetime of work that depicted people on society's margins, from circus workers in India to homeless women in Seattle. In 2012, Mark told SF Weekly that her no-holds-barred approach stripped her of some museum recognition: "I don't think of what's going to sell, and I've suffered from it. I'm still interested in humanity and people, even though the art world is not. They don't seem to think that photos of people or humanistic pictures merit as art. But I disagree. And I'm certainly not going to change what I do." The art world has lost a humanitarian whose eye for unique people — and details — never wavered.

Monir Farmanfarmaian is a national treasure in Iran and among the Iranian diaspora for her unique interpretations of traditional Persian mirror art. At Haines Gallery, Farmanfarmaian shows off a unique dimension of her work: drawings of hexagonal shapes that bisect and intersect with tiny jewel-like clusters. "Based on the Hexagon: The Recent Drawings of Monir Farmanfarmaian" is a dazzling display of geometrical form from a nonagenarian who shows no signs of slowing down.